Külföldi torrent oldalak Porn Will Be Next On Australia's Website-blocking Agenda

One way or another, you can be sure anti-porn crusaders will push to extend Australia's new anti-piracy laws.

"If we can block piracy, why can't we block porn?" Expect to hear that question a lot in the aftermath of Australia's new anti-piracy laws designed to block The Pirate Bay.

It's a rather simplistic question, failing to appreciate the differences between Turnbull's piracy crackdown and Conroy's abandoned porn filter, but that won't stop people asking.

The Australian Christian Lobby didn't even wait for the legislation to pass, calling for the proposed anti-piracy laws to extend to porn in April during the copyright senate enquiry.

Back when Conroy's porn filter was on the table, there were calls to expand it to cover other vices like piracy and gambling. Now that the piracy bill has passed through the Senate, you can be sure the ACL and others are looking for ways to expand it or loopholes to exploit it.

The main difference between Turnbull's piracy crackdown and Conroy's porn filter is that Turnbull's anti-piracy push will be overseen by the courts and has many more checks and balances.

Conroy wanted porn filtering decisions to be made by bureaucrats behind closed doors, leaving it far more open to abuse. Under the new anti-piracy laws, copyright holders will need to convince a judge that a site should be blocked and we'll be able to see which sites are affected.

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Of course there's a lot of overlap when it comes to porn and copyright infringement.

The entire business model of many porn aggregation sites seems to be to steal videos from subscription services and offer them for free, although the relationship between such sites is more complicated than you might think.

The ACL can't simply point out that YouPorn has lifted videos from other sites and therefore convince a judge that YouPorn should be blocked. The complaint has to come from the copyright holder, or from an Australian company that has licensed the content – although just one infringement is enough to lodge a request to have a site blocked.

To have YouPorn blocked, the ACL would need to either own or license something that's on the site – which is perhaps a bridge too far in their fight against porn.

Depending on how it was done, such tactics might be viewed by the courts as an abuse of process and knocked back – one of the advantages of having this process overseen by a judge rather than backroom bureaucrats.

There's another more practical loophole for anti-porn crusaders to target; music. You can be sure if you trawled through any porn aggregation site that you'd find clips using copyrighted music without permission.

If you found an artist or music label happy to play ball, you might be able to have porn sites blocked that way – assuming the judge signed off on it. Alternatively the ACL could license the Australian rights to "bow chicka wow wow" and hope to wipe out 1970s porn overnight.

You can be sure that every lobby group in Australia which wants something banned is sitting around brainstorming ideas on how to turn the new anti-piracy rules to their advantage.

Rather than looking for loopholes, the ACL will more likely just bide its time and wait for the government to declare the anti-piracy laws a success.

Australian piracy rates will definitely drop once the site-blocking laws come into effect – mostly because Aussie pirates will be cloaking their location and appearing to come from somewhere else.

It's like setting up a roadblock, knowing full well that people are driving around it, but deeming the roadblock a success because no-one has driven through it.

Once the government declares its online piracy roadblock a success, lobby groups will be lining up to claim that this successful strategy should also be applied to the things they oppose. Censorship has always been a slippery slope.

How do you think other lobby groups might turn the new anti-piracy laws to their advantage?